Sun, Feb 24, 2008from Washington Post (US): Exxon Oil Spill Case May Get Closure"When a federal jury in Alaska in 1994 ordered Exxon to pay $5 billion to thousands of people who had their lives disrupted by the massive Exxon Valdez oil spill, an appeal of the nation's largest punitive damages award was inevitable. But almost no one could have predicted the incredible round of legal ping-pong that only this month lands at the Supreme Court." ...

Fri, Feb 22, 2008from American Chemical Society: Translation: Earthworms and transmission of toxins"Earthworms are an important link in transporting environmental contaminants from soil to other organisms in terrestrial food webs. Large molecules (>0.95 nm), such as PBDEs, are thought to not readily cross membranes, and thus do not accumulate in organisms. However, earthworms have been shown to accumulate contaminants of considerable size (8), including significant bioaccumulation from sludge-amended soils with mean biota-soil accumulation factors (BSAFs) of 4-8 for BDE-47, -99, and -100 (7). Similarly, studies of the aquatic worm, Lumbriculus variegatus, in PBDE-spiked sediments gave BSAFs of 3 for BDE-47 and -99 (9)." ...

Translation: "Worms were thought not to gather toxins from human-sewage sludge. However, that idea was wrong, even though we sell human-sewage sludge to farmers these days."What that implies: every early bird who gets the worm also gets concentrated toxins. It's as if the "prime soil predator" was concentrating toxins, not unlike bats (for prime air predator) and killer whales (prime ocean predator), concentrating toxins.

Thu, Feb 21, 2008from Environmental Science and Technology: Worms bear sludge load"Pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs) end up in the tons of solid sludge left behind by wastewater treatment processes. Those so-called biosolids are often repackaged and sold as fertilizers for both industrial and small-scale agriculture. In a new survey, published in ES&T (DOI: 10.1021/es702304c), researchers show for the first time that those compounds can turn up in earthworms ... Bioaccumulation of PPCPs by worms is not entirely a surprise, according to Stockholm University's Cynthia De Wit, who points to her own work looking at PBDEs and other persistent compounds in earthworms. However, the new research underscores that worms could serve as monitoring organisms, she says. Because the worms seem to concentrate compounds that may be present at undetectable levels in the soils, they can be "a sort of sentinel, or magnifying glass of what's in the soil," she adds." ...

From canaries in the coal mine to earthworms in the soil, other species bear too much of a load.

Wed, Feb 20, 2008from Associated Press: Oil jumps above $100 on refinery outage"NEW YORK - Oil futures shot higher Tuesday, closing above $100 for the first time as investors bet that crude prices will keep climbing despite evidence of plentiful supplies and falling demand. At the pump, gas prices rose further above $3 a gallon. There was no single driver behind oil's sharp price jump; investors seized on an explosion at a 67,000 barrel per day refinery in Texas, the falling dollar, the possibility that OPEC may cut production next month, the threat of new violence in Nigeria and continuing tensions between the U.S. and Venezuela. The fact that there was no overriding reason for such a price spike could be a bad omen for consumers already bearing the burdens of high heating costs and falling real estate values." ...